


The Permanence of Snowflakes

by kyrilu



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Family, Gen, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:19:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Elsa wonders if anyone will ever ask her why she created a snowman who longs for summer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Permanence of Snowflakes

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is basically me finishing something that I started last year, after I watched Frozen for the first time. Whoops.
> 
> This is the painting referenced in the fic: [The Sea of Ice](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg). I was pleased to find out that it isn't actually an anachronism, which was a complete coincidence, because I just basically googled one of the first Romantic artists that came to my mind - Friedrich, who did the beautiful Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - and stumbled upon The Sea of Ice, which _fits._

1.

Elsa wears away pairs of gloves easily. As time goes on - hours spent flexing her fingers: curl, uncurl - the fabric gets ragged. Sometimes her self-control fails, and the gloves freeze on her hands. The ice forms a crystal cage that she eventually shatters, and her father and her mother always look at her sadly when she shows them the frosted cloth. But they replace the gloves anyway - the same blue color, the same blue pattern.

“Conceal, don’t feel,” they’ll remind her. And they’ll leave her with a warm kiss on her cheek, a warm kiss on her forehead, and brand new gloves for the cold.

 

2.

One afternoon in the summer - before the mountain trolls, before the accident - Elsa and Anna go out to play in the palace’s rose garden. Anna loves the flowers: she whispers to them like she whispers to Elsa’s snowmen. She looks like a butterfly in the sun, flitting from bud to bud, her little dress flaring vividness into the light.

Elsa doesn’t like summer. But she stays out, anyway, her chin on her knuckles as she watches Anna dance around. She wishes she can cool herself with her power, but she doesn’t. Sometimes her own power scares her - sometimes it feels like it’s too much for something as petty as this.

Anna notices Elsa sitting in the shade, and cartwheels her way with a smile so full of childish understanding that Elsa wants to cry. Her braid is flopped over on her face, in disarray, and Anna lets out puffed breath to clear her eyes.

“It’s okay,” Anna says, and she pulls at Elsa’s hands. “We can go inside now. You can make snowflake pictures on the windows.”

Elsa hesitates, then shakes her head. “I’ll stay out with you if you want. You like the flowers.” She mumbles into her hands, almost muffling the words, “Some people are worth melting for.”

 

3.

 Sometimes Elsa wonders if anyone will ever ask her why she created a snowman who longs for summer.

 

4.

Inside one of the palace’s dusty rooms, there’s a copy of a German painting called _The Sea of Ice._ When Anna sleeps, Elsa creeps outside her room to look at it, putting a hand on the gilded frame. She tilts her head at the ruins of the ship embedded inside the ice, puzzling over the geometry and the edges.

On happier nights, she thinks, _This isn’t what happened. The ice didn’t kill my parents. It was just the storm, the waves, and I miss them._

On sadder nights, she thinks, _I did this. I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong._ And, unbidden, the ice spells out the painting’s other title on her gloved palm: _Die gescheiterte Hoffnung_ , the Wreck of Hope.

With this power, she could have done something. With her twisted, unwanted connection to nature, she could have done something.

 

5.

Two nights later, the painting disappears. Like it had never been there. Elsa asks a maidservant what happened to it, and she tells Elsa that Princess Anna requested for it to be removed because it reminded her of their parents’ fate.

(This is what Anna didn’t tell the maidservant: she saw that the door to the abandoned room was open, and she guessed what her elder sister was thinking about. Maybe it was selfishness that led her to have the painting to be taken away - _talk to me, don’t just stare at that picture, please._ Maybe it was kindness - because she was hurting, too, and deep down, even if the memories were magically removed, she knew what the ice meant to Elsa.)

 

6.

After everything - after Elsa returns to Arendelle, after Anna discovers the truth and lives, after the debacles of Prince Hans and Duke of Weselton is resolved - Elsa makes an crystalline butterfly flutter from her fingertips. She’s standing by an open window, and she watches it go.

She says out loud, “How can you love something so much even if it hurts?”

Even with freedom, even with revelation, the snow is tied to things heavier than the fierce joy of creation and love. Her cheerful little snowman who longed for summer.

She thinks of _The Wreck of Hope_ , the ship angled to the sky and the jagged shards of ice surrounding it. She finds that Anna is standing right next to her - she’d entered her bedroom almost soundlessly, maybe about to ask her to go skating or have hot chocolate together - and Anna’s reflection is mere fragments, reflections, on the half-open glass window.

Anna watches the butterfly. She flickers her fingers as if she can reach the butterfly from here, and then shrugs in a very Anna-like way. “You just do,” she says. She takes hold of Elsa’s bare hands and doesn’t seem to mind the cold.

 


End file.
